nah prequels rule. george lucas is a weird dude but a great world builder. its cool his wife edited some of his movies but the vision and influence of the original creator cant be discounted out of hand as if it means nothing. star wars wouldnt be star wars without george lucas, and as talented as his wife may be she really only just helped

there are a million and one creative minds who had inspiration and support from the loved ones and people in their lives. its cool and heartwarming but like cmon lol just because you suggest a few good ideas doesnt mean you deserve all the credit thats insane

so many people jump through hoops to "explain" why star wars movies are popular and well received. like oh, it wasnt lucas, it was kaplan and his writing. or oh, it wasnt lucas, it was his wife and her editing. or oh, it wasnt lucas, it was mcquarrie's art, or it was this or that or this. ive heard it all before. the fact of the matter is, george lucas is responsible for star wars, good and bad, like him or not. he was surrounded by brilliant people who absolutely did wonders for the movie, and it wouldnt have been successful without their effort, either, but its unfair and flat out ignorant to say that the original creator and visionary of the whole thing had NOTHING to do with it

but its unfair and flat out ignorant to say that the original creator and visionary of the whole thing had NOTHING to do with it

didn't say this! and made that clear the other day in the skype chat i thought, but i also think the hero worship for lucas is vastly overemphasized too, especially when that narrative was very much crafted by himself and the Lucas estate (and virtually wrote out the involvement of Marcia Lucas which is a shame since she was a seminal editor in hollywood at the time even before her involvement with helping George. after their marriage she was only rarely ever mentioned as a footnote in his story. it's not that i'm saying she deserved all the credit, but according to Lucas she deserves none)

the prequels don't have a good storytelling bone in their deformed bodies. lore on its own is a wikipedia page or the first few chapters in a bad fan fiction forum, not an actual narrative with stakes you care about

also also, i don't think it's an unfair conversation to have when a directors former output has great critical success and his later output doesn't to ask what changed, whether that be a change in creative team or a personal change in their lives (this goes for writers, musicians, etc)

I think you can absolutely look at the shoddy design of the prequels and say that they're lacking in comparison to McQuarrie's genius work in the originals or look at how the editing choices in the prequels never let emotional moments breath is lacking when compared to Marcia Lucas' pretty amazing editing in the originals that always managed to give the character moments breathing room without sacrificing it's brisk pacing (that's some tough shit to do). This is especially valid in Star Wars's creation which was so much dependent on the input of other, from Coppola, to Scorsese, and especially Marcia (it's how every step in the writing process of that movie was done, and there are tons of testimony to how important she was, from Hamill, to Milius, to Murch. She didn't just help, she was essential). It doesn't mean it's an all or nothing referendum on George Lucas' being good or bad, it's just a closer examination of storytelling mechanics. I think you recognized as much in George's involvement with the prequel cartoons, right?

It's speculation, but I don't think it's baseless

edit: star wars is it's own particular situation, but i'd go as far as to say that American Graffiti straight up wouldn't have worked without Marcia Lucas' editing. this is pretty much backed up in the history of the making of the film, where i think even George acknowledges the previous edits were a mess before Marcia got her hands on it

When Lucas returned home, he was exhausted and disappointed in his film; Marcia had to rush him to the Marin General Hospital because of stress-induced chest pains not long after they got back.*Lucas had hired a U.K. union editor--John Jympson--to cut the film while they were in England, but when Lucas had seen the rough cut he was horrified; the film was dull and without any of the kinetic energy he had envisioned. Jympson was fired, and Marcia took his place, starting over from scratch with George once they were back in California, working in the Parkhouse carriage house which was converted into an editing building.*"He asked Marcia to work on the final battle sequence, so ILM could start, but he needed someone else to start at the beginning," says Richard Chew, [lxi] whom*Lucas knew from Coppola's The Conversation and John Korty's films, and was hired not long after Marcia began cutting. With the entire Jympson cut junked wholesale, the film needed to be re-ordered back into dailies so that Marcia and Chew could totally start over, a laborious task for the editors, assistants and film librarians. "No one had been editing on the movie for several months," Lucas states in The Making of Star Wars, "so the first thing we had to do when we got back to San Anselmo was to reconstitute everything that had been cut in England, put it back in dailies form, and start from scratch. It turned out to be even more of a tremendous job than we thought it was going to be. We were running against a terrible time problem, so we hired [another] editor, Richard Chew. He and my wife Marcia, who was also an editor, raced to get a first rough cut of the movie ready by Thanksgiving." [lxii]

The workload was*daunting. Carol Ballard walked in Parkhouse one day at 6AM to find a bleary-eyed Marcia still cutting. Lucas was cutting the*Falcon gun-port battle himself, Chew states, "then he went upstairs to his editing room and his Steenbeck editing table and looked through all the trims, while I continued working from the beginning of the film and Marcia was working on the end."*[lxiii] A third editor, Paul Hirsch, whom Lucas knew from De Palma's Carrie, was later hired since there was so much to do. "Marcia Lucas called me," Hirsch recalls. "And she said, 'Things are going a lot slower than we had hoped; our editor in England didn't work out and we're having to recut everything. We've got Richard Chew on the picture--but we're not getting enough done!'" [lxiv] He accepted the offer but admits being nervous. "I was a little intimidated," he says, "because both Marcia and Richard*had been nominated for Academy Awards before, and I was just this kid from New York, but they were great." [lxv] He was stationed on the Moviola, but it did not agree with him. "I had forgotten how many years it had been since I had worked on one, so I was all thumbs, breaking the film, dropping it, and wasting a lot of time just trying to get the film to go through the machine. So Marcia said, 'I don't care, I'll work on the Moviola.' After that, I was working upstairs in George's room on the Steenbeck." [lxvi]* Marcia and Chew remained downstairs, closer to the assistant editors and coding machine (used for syncing ILM shots).Marcia continued to work on the film as the months went by, trying to fashion a more emotional experience from what she had to work with.

The Death Star trench run was originally scripted entirely different, with Luke having two runs at the exhaust port; Marcia had re-ordered the shots almost from the ground up, trying to build tension lacking in the original scripted sequence, which was why this one was the most complicated (Deleted Magic has a faithful reproduction of the original assembly, which is surprisingly unsatisfying).*She warned George, "If the audience doesn't cheer when Han Solo comes in at the last second in the Millennium Falcon to help Luke when he's being chased by Darth Vader, the*picture doesn't work."

"[Marcia] was instrumental in changing the ending of Raiders, in which Indiana delivers the ark to Washington. Marion is nowhere to be seen, presumably stranded on an island with a submarine and a lot of melted Nazis. Marcia watched the rough cut in silence and then levelled the boom. She said there was no emotional resolution to the ending, because the girl disappears. 'Everyone was feeling really good until she said that,' Dunham recalls. 'It was one of those, "Oh no we lost sight of that."*' Spielberg reshot the scene in downtown San Francisco, having Marion wait for Indiana on the steps on the government building. Marcia, once again, had come to the rescue."